Apheresis

1. n. An operation by which any part is separated from the rest.
2. n. The dropping of a letter or syllable from the beginning of a word; e. g., cute for acute.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.